poem
Volume 20, Number 3

Kropotkin's Universal Bread Distribution Apparatus

(CE 1910)

When We, the Workers realized
that mutual aid
is as much a law of life
as mutual struggle,
We rationalized the end of States,
and new life started again
in agricultural and industrial centers:

fields, factories, and workshops
converted to a single principle
of individual drive and free agreement,
and a remarkable Apparatus
blossomed from the iron flower of ideals,
the prodigy of dreams.

The Workers, seeing
an eternal leisure on the horizon,
automated everything:
the system functioned fluidly;
and as networks of
glass and brass pneumatic tubes
integrated the gas-lit globe
to funnel grain,
labor became a voluntary thing,
and We began to develop ourselves
as We saw fit.

Now like clockwork, automated carts
wheel from the Central Bakery
(half the size of the Ukraine
and surrounded by a continent of wheat)
to transfer points, from where
they head in all directions
by ship and submarine, by zeppelin
and mechanical bird,
soaring, steaming, or gearing
to Continental Distribution Hubs,
delivering promised bounty of fresh-made loaves.

This is the conquest by bread,
hunger has died.


—Wade German